Watch: What the 'most satisfying videos in the world' all have in common
A YouTube channel has uploaded 13 videos with that title and attracted millions of viewers.
A series of repetitive, often mundane tasks play out against the backdrop of music that is sometimes unobtrusive, sometimes irritating. There is a lot of slow-motion. Patterns are created repeatedly. Everything is symmetrical. There is a never-ending stream of money shots. Beautiful objects harden into shape. A single brush creates a swirl of colours. Yellow congealed paint is scooped out of a container.
The visuals are mesmering and hypnotic. They are also boring after the first 30 seconds.
These are a series of videos that claim to be “the most satisfying” in the world. The video above, the 13th installment, was uploaded on June 25 and has already garnered more than three million views.
So what is it about these videos – seemingly just montage sequences of activities – that makes them so popular?
Take, for instance, the following video by Digg, with more than 13.5 million views, which seems to be the most popular of the lot. In it, cans are crushed in quick succession, a tomato is cut into the tiniest of slices, an Eiffel Tower replica is created and cakes are decorated. Is that what satisfaction feels like?
Perhaps the videos reflect the innate desire of human beings to seek order in a chaotic world. Nothing breaks, no one falls and there's no mess. Most of it is just machines or an assembly line of workers arranging disparate parts into some kind of perfect whole. Except this video below, which has a slightly unsettling image of someone slicing off the corners of what looks like a phone book. To make up for that , it shows something that gives the universe meaning once again – a machine solving a Rubik's Cube.
